This was the #SFFBookClub January selection, and I bounced off it kind of hard. Which is particularly sad considering that I'd added it to the shortlist, after it was cited by an article from which other recommendations have been fun. But this one did not work for me, in ways that actively put me off.

I think I'm probably prejudiced against it by the physical book being so poorly printed that it's more work to read. There are no margins, meaning that starts and ends of lines disappear into the centre fold. And even within that it's aligned so poorly that a number of pages have a last line more than half of which is off the page. These are not the reasons I'm bouncing, but they definitely made me less patient.

What put me off the most is a weird imbalance between the book doing a lot of 'splaining in the mouths of its characters--kind of Legend of Zelda style--while at the same time throwing a lot of Bantu (I'm not sure which specific language[s]) vocabulary at the reader without notes or translations - in at least one case, about 1/4 of a page. I have a lot of time for using the languages that cultural references come from, without necessarily translating ( outside.ofa.dog/book/146782/s/david-mogo does this to good atmospheric effect), but it made the over-explaining all the more jarring.

I then learned that the author is white, which bugs me for a story so heavily rooted in Bantu mysticism. He clearly is knowledgeable about the subject, but these aren't his stories to tell, and in this light the over-explaining feels like a white man showing off how cool he is because he knows about the subalterns' culture. I think the "Runes" character (a jumbled Celtic / New Age Druid wizard in Durban) is meant to be self-deprecating, but he's so secondary to the "Bones" character (the Bantu wizard) that I'm still left feeling that the wrong person is telling this story, in ways that are definitely to the book's detriment.